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Comment by ethbro | Hacker News Reader

For curiosity's sake, do any professional game developers have stories of working at a place that wasn't a shit show?

Is that just the industry? Or are we just hearing about the worst cases?

You tend to hear the worst cases. For all the bad rep EA gets, like any big company a lot depends on your team and manager. I worked two separate 3-4 year stints on central tech teams and never had forced overtime (although there was some pressure / expectation at times) and things were reasonably sane. My time at Relic was also fairly positive with some long hours but mostly self imposed.

Game development is generally complex and has some special challenges but given those constraints isn't always worse than many typical software projects.

I can vouch for this.

(Hi, Matt!)

I spent 17 years at EA among a number of teams and found the most challenging parts were the BigCo related issues; things like cultural mismatches between groups that have been ordered together, or politics. The working hours were standard for the most part, occasionally there would be a fire to put out but all the management I had was fair about compensating for any extra hours.

Working under a studio published by EA was very much the opposite experience. It was crunch till you drop, don't dare put the studio logo in the game or you'll be fired, shit-show rodeo from beginning to end.

Coworkers I had from other parts(Nascar, NFS/EA Seattle, etc) all had similar stories and of course there's the infamous easpouse.

In case anyone else needs to lookup the term easpouse, I assume it relates to this post: https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html

My direct experience is that the third parties doing work-for-hire gigs tend to get the worst of it, because they're disposable. When the publisher owns the studio there's some fiefdom management that takes place that allows the bosses to protect their employees in a sort of empire-building strategy. When it's a contract, oftentimes the studio management is suckered into taking a deal they can't deliver on. The publisher subsequently squeezes them dry, then buys up the remains of the dead husk to ship something for cheap and perhaps scoop up the best employees. A successful third-party more or less has to play hardball from the get-go and find a way to block this strategy.

The publishers have a weaker hand to play today, since it's easy to go to market with minimal marketing and distribution spend, but that has the side effect of making it more common to see tiny studios that run a sweatshop churning out bad products.

Hey Max!

Yep, it was the big company stuff that led me to leave EA on both occasions but I worked with many smart, competent people there (Max included) and learned a lot. I heard some horror stories and don't doubt that there was truth to them but I never personally experienced any of the really toxic games industry stuff that you hear about. To be honest I think I'd have just left if I had, there was never a time where finding another job was a major concern.

So weird that there are such huge differences in experience between comments.

Why do you think you weren’t part of those other groups of people who did have to work unpaid overtime every week? Were you in an area with lots of people for whom finding another job wasn’t a major concern?

I don't think it's that weird, I've heard horror stories about working at many big companies - Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Netflix... Typically there will be other people responding to the stories saying that they didn't have the same experience at those companies.

As I said in my original comment, a lot depends on your manager and your team. It probably also depends on your location (my experience was at the Vancouver studio) and when you were at the company.

While it does seem that some companies and industries might be worse than others depending on the culture, in general it looks to me like you're better off with the best manager / team in a 'bad' company than with the worst manager or team in a 'good' company and not everyone is going to have the same experience in the same company.

Being on a central technology team at EA I think meant less crunch than being on a game team with hard ship deadlines. Friends I know who worked on game teams at the same studio had more crunch periods but they also typically got more 'comp time' (an EA term for extra vacation time given after ship) and might also get bigger bonuses. I think they sometimes got more pressure to work overtime.

Thank you! I forwarded your responses to a friend who was interested too.

Hey, Max! We worked together across oceans a little bit when you were here. Just wanted to agree with your assessment. In the various teams/roles I've been in here over the last 6 years, from game team to core tech, I've gone through periods of a lot of overtime and no overtime. Even when I was doing some long hours (especially on my first title), I always felt fairly compensated and never felt forced to crunch. Having said that it really does depend on the team/manager/specific area of work - in the very same studio I knew others who were going through some serious crunch and subsequent burnout.

I wonder if some of the horror stories are partially attributable to technical folks being bad at interpersonal dynamics.

I can see crunch situations (ship deadline approaching, much work to be done) demanding a lot of communication skills between managers and developers for everyone to feel good.

If someone on either side drops the ball (being overly aggressive / under appreciating, failing to clearly communicate work-life limits and expectations), it ends very ugly.

I work on the very small team that develops the X-Plane flight simulator. We’re kind of on the periphery of game dev, but I can assure you, work is not crazy for us.

I was responsible for rewriting the UI more or less from scratch for the most recent major version, and at the height of “crunch time” leading up to the release, I worked maybe 50 hours a week... and most of that was voluntary, because, though I had the option to cut features to make the deadline, I really wanted to get stuff in.

Been reading through the full book of this guy who designed alot of the dungeons in World of Warcraft. He's realistic about alot of the challenges they faced but overall had a good experience with the project.

Site: https://whenitsready.com/wowdiary/

His description of Blizzard makes it sound like a nightmarish hellhole to me. I get being so passionate about what you're working on that you love your job in spite of all the problems, but he seems to view the problems as being somehow necessary for the parts he loves.

People in abusive relationships tend to justify the people who abuse them.

I worked for EA many years ago (on a game, not tech/tools) and while I wouldn't call it a shit show (I liked the people for the most part, for example), that experience is definitely the reason why I have never even considered working for another game company. Absolutely ridiculous hours, every year. Everyone else just seemed to act like it was normal, even people who had young kids. At the time it seemed crazy. With many years of hindsight, it still seems crazy.

Hunting for jobs in the Austin area or remote this year I got 4 offers, one was from EA, which was 20% less than the top 2 offers, 15% less than the 3rd best offer.

So you get a bit less pay for your trouble too :D

Unless you make your OWN game and it is a big hit, but that is VERY hard right now.

Yes, that was my experience as well. In my case I think it was a minor pay increase compared to my previous job, but a significant portion of that total compensation came in the form of an annual bonus (so from my perspective it was as though they were basically withholding a big chunk of my income each year).

That does seem to be a feature in the game industry -- a lot riding on bonuses (and often the contract terms defining their payout).

And when you have compensation terms without being empowered to influence them... burnout.

Capricious bonus terms with a large public company always felt slimy to me. It seems a pretty large conflict of interest. In contrast to: 'We agree on what my work is worth, if I don't do the work as expected then you fire me.'

How Dead Space's Scariest Scene Almost Killed the Game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ3iqq49Ew8

Disregard the clickbait title. Cofounder Glen Schofield talks about how they resolved all bad bugs 2 weeks ahead of schedule and came out with one of the most innovative titles in the past 20 years.

I'm working in the industry at one of the largest publishers on AAA title and I have pretty much just positive things to say. Both about the working environment and the projects we work on. I think it's definitely the case that the worst cases are the most publicised and not many people write about the good ones.

Ohai gambiting.

I know we work for the same company and I generally agree that our company is one of the better ones. Which is not to say that there's no shit being flung around.

But our company is not known for being loved by gamers. I wonder if terrible working conditions is somehow related to creating better games. Horrible thought though.

Hi dijit :-)

I know what you mean....on one hand, it's great that the conditions here are pretty good(I pretty much never work more than 40 hours/week, overtime is extremely rare, at least for us programmers), but on the other hand.....I don't know. I don't want to say that working more would lead to better games - I honestly don't believe that the problems with our games could be solved if we suddenly started doing 80 hour weeks and work all weekends. I think at least some of them stem from how we approach building games in terms of design and production planning(at least for the AAA titles) instead of the fact that people here generally have good work-life balance.

And yes, of course there is some shit being flung around like you said, but (at least for me) nothing approaching the horror stories I hear from other places. Maybe we're just lucky - our company has loads of studios all over the globe, after all.

It does seem like good games are won and lost in pre-production.

Which is unfortunate, given so much of the team gets staffed after those decisions are made (as I understand it).

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